ETD Guide/Introduction/Improve visibility

Once ETDs are collected on behalf of educational institutions, digital library technology makes it easy for works to be found. Through http://www.theses.org/, NDLTD directly makes ETDs available, and points to other services that facilitate such discovery. As a result, hundreds or thousands of accesses per year per work are logged, for example, according to reports from the Virginia Tech library regarding the ETDs it makes publicly accessible. As the collection of available ETDs grows and reaches critical mass, it is likely that it will be frequently consulted by the millions of researchers and graduate students interested in such detailed studies, expositions of new methodologies, reviews of the literature on specialized topics, extensive bibliographies, illustrative figures and tables, and highly expressive multimedia supplements. Thus, students and student works will become more visible, facilitating advances in scholarship and leading to increased collaboration, each made possible by electronic communication, across space and time.